FIG. 1 shows a commonly used network arrangement in which a plurality of local computer systems in a local area network (LAN) may access a plurality of remote servers through the Internet. Each remote server may include World Wide Web sites (web sites) that each include a plurality of World Wide Web pages (web pages). Each local computer system may access the remote web sites with web browser software, such as Netscape Navigator™, available from Netscape Communications Corporation of Mountain View, Calif.
Web sites typically are arranged in a hierarchical branching tree structure having a plurality of nodes that contain one or more of the web pages in the site. Each of the nodes in the site are considered to be on various levels of each branch in the tree structure. For example, a first node is considered to be on a lower level than a second node in the same branch if a web page in the first node includes the second node in its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Conversely, a third web node in the same branch is considered to be on a higher level than the second node if the URL of a web page in the second node includes the third node.
Web pages accessed over the Internet, via a browser, commonly are downloaded onto the volatile cache 200a of the local computer system. In the computer system shown in FIG. 1, for example, the volatile cache 200a is a high speed, first-in, first-out buffer that temporarily stores web pages from accessed remote web sites. The volatile cache thus enables a user to quickly review web pages that were already downloaded, thereby eliminating the need to repeat the relatively slow process of traversing the Internet to access previously viewed web pages. If the local computer system had not been turned off since the download, such web pages may be retrieved from the cache and displayed on the local computer system when the local computer system is disconnected from the network (i.e. during disconnect).
When the local computer system is turned off (i.e. erasing the contents of the volatile cache), a user often must again re-execute the web browser and traverse the Internet to access a previously accessed web page. This is inconvenient and time consuming. The art has responded to this problem by enabling users to save entire remote web sites, and other remote web sites linked to those saved remote web sites, in the non-volatile memory of the local computer system. These saved remote sites may be quickly and easily accessed at a later time without having to inconveniently traverse the Internet. Due to the increasing size of both the World Wide Web and sites on the web, however, such a download into the non-volatile memory of the local computer system often can be time consuming and use an extremely large amount of non-volatile memory space in the local computer system.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have an apparatus and method that efficiently enables a local computer system to store preselected remote network documents from remote network sites for review when the local computer system is disconnected from the network.